With a slew of adrenaline-pumping activities rivaling adventure hotspots like Queenstown, New Zealand, and Interlaken, Switzerland, Colorado holds bragging rights as one of the top domestic destinations to get your summer kicks all in one place.

Friendly Colorado resort towns like Winter Park, Glenwood Springs and Snowmass Village offer a more intimate feel than some of their better-known cousins like Vail and Breckenridge – and at more reasonable prices.

South Island adventuring races the gamut from bungee jumping and jet-boating to paragliding and sky-diving, but after doing it all I found my tastes ran to wet and ice, from Class IV rafting and motor-boating the Marlborough Sounds to tramping around on a blue-ice glacier. And it all began like this:

Rafting addicts start young, like forty years ago when I built my first and very unwieldy raft from two road-grader inner-tubes, six 30-gallon oil drums, a slew of 1" x 8" planks and coils of bailing wire to raft the Colorado River above Moab, Utah.

That multi-day episode ended after a whirlpool catapulted four of us, including wife number one, onto a sheer rock cliff.

Though wife one was gallantly rescued and dropped safely on the other side of the river, the side with a road, marriage number one never seemed quite the same... Read more

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